Apple isn't selling stand-alone hardware. They sell a package which includes the operating system built into the machine.
You can't separate macOS from the Mac. It's just one package.
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I refuse to buy an Apple Silicon Mac with only 8 GB RAM!
- Thread starter AlixSPQR
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Apple isn't selling stand-alone hardware. They sell a package which includes the operating system built into the machine.
You can't separate macOS from the Mac. It's just one package.
"King Richard: A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
-Shakespare, Richard III
Was the horse overpriced? No, at that moment king Richard believed a horse was more valuable to him than the kingdom of England and was willing to trade.
I mean, if he thought the horse was to expensive he could have just offered up Wales or Cornwall.
We'll see. Combined with the low 8GB RAM and the more swap focused newer macOS, we'll see in 4 to 5 years of these machines. In any case, Apple will see tighter upgrade cycle every 4 to 5 years by keeping these pathetic base spec of 8/256. I'm predicting 8/256 will be the base (for mba and 13 MBP) for the foreseeable future.
Judging by your signature, you didn't go crazy with your 2019 16" MBP at least as far as RAM and SSD. 32g/1Tb is one notch above 16g/512gb which is the bare minimum spec for a developer laptop (particularly if that developer is working with Docker or VMs).
The GPU upgrade might be considered an indulgence by some but in my older Macs I found the GPU dated faster than anything else.
If you bought in 2019, you already have had about three years use from your MBP. It should be good for at least another three or four years.
There is of course no evidence that Richard III ever considered exchanging his Kingdom for a horse. It was a great line of Shakespeare's though to convey drama and desperation.
The important thing to remember about all of Shakespeare's plays about the Plantagenets was he was writing for an audience who were subjects of a Tudor monarch.
I had the 2016 15", thank you for the correction.
My point stands that 8gb RAM on an M1 feels like 16gb on an Intel, and that most folks shouldn't get too hung up on this particular metric. Like, it's nice to have, but it's not crippling like it used to be.
The price for 128 should have come down to be the same price for the 64 models in my opinion. I used to get the 64 gig model but found I was filling that space up and I don't do a lot with my phone. The 128 is the sweet spot, plenty of free space to not have to worry about filling it. 64 gig does not make a lot of sense for most people, especially when you have a camera that can record in 4K, that storage space goes right down very quickly if you are shooting any video.
Isn't that what happened essentially? I guess if you didn't want the smaller screen on the mini then there's a loss there, but the 128GB config now slots in where the 64GB used to be.
Anyone writing that much data certainly shouldn’t be buying the base model, and they are not the intended audience for it.
For comparison, I use a MBP M1 Pro 16 for the screen real estate, but I don’t need the processing power of the machine since my primary usage is academic, office type applications with light data analysis. I’m a heavy user though, running many applications for 8 plus hours per day.
Basically, if I didn’t need the larger screen I’d be very much within the target audience for the Air. In 8 months of heavy usage I’ve written 2.6 TB of data. At that rate the drive in the Air would outlast most people reading this thread.
I get that most people are perfectly fine with 8GB. My issue is that even the step-up stock models are still not 16GB on most models. So in order to get a MBA, a 13" MBP, a Mac mini, and iMac you actually have to special order a configuration. It also means you can't use standard retailers like BestBuy, Amazon and Costco to get their discounts and perks.
I think this is the biggest problem.
I want 16GB Airs and 32GB Macbook Pros to be non-custom orders so I can buy them from common retailers like you said. It sucks that the base configs are often discounted by a few hundred dollars but upgraded RAM models almost never deviate too much from the MSRP.
Unless the rest of the industry soon switches to 16 GB RAM standard on base model laptops, Apple staying with 8 GB base RAM indefinitely is probably going to keep older Macs viable for longer: it makes it so developers (particularly web developers) have to take into consideration an 8 GB standard target when shoving excess JavaScript and assets into a webpage.
If the fast pace of base RAM increase from 2001 to 2011 had continued from 2011 to 2021, 10-year-old MacBooks with 8 GB RAM would be much less usable for modern tasks than they are today.
Just like for the rest of premium laptop industry. Apple's current value proposition in terms of performance and overall usability already far exceeds the competition. Why would they willingly take a $200-400 hit in revenue per laptop sold? To please some internet forum critics?
We will get 16GB/512GB minimal config in the MBA when it becomes baseline for Dell, HP and Lenovo. Until then it's business as usual.
I agree. The value of Macbooks are great as long as you compare them to premium PCs as well.
I don't think the value is bad at all. If not, I wouldn't have bought two of them already.
I just want upgraded memory configs as standard in common retailers. IE. Sell a 32/512 16" MBP on Amazon for $400 more than 16/512 on day one of launch.
On Amazon right now, 16/512 costs $2200. 32/512 costs $2750. The upgraded RAM actually costs 550 instead of $400 because base models are always discounted more.
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Intel was complacent. Holy crap they thought they were king of the hill. And apple crapped all over their superiority.
And yes, a lot of it right now lays heavily on emulation. At this point it’s more of a proof of concept. Learning in in and out of apples new silicon hasn’t been easy. Almost everything has changed as far as protocols and direction of processes and the implementation of how these new chips speak to each other. It’s like trying to learn c++ and Java while learning how to play the piano. I feel like a kid again learning about everything. I’m surprised the hodge podge of code I’ve written even works.
Proxmox, well it works. The virtualization works. So far it’s all down to spoofing IDs. I’ve been able to stably create VMs of older max or on top of the macOS it’s currently running. I’ve played around with doing Time Machine backups with older version of osx within Ventura.
A friend has a server set up to run Ventura with esxi. He’s figuring out how to force the one board components to do all of the processing in house while hosting the OS on a server. Basically using the Mac to push all process functionality towards the processor receiving the virtual OS. Instead of the server doing the chugging. Sounds impossible.
AMD also took advantage of Intel's stagnation. Intel's foundries have become an embarrassment.
How were you able to overcome iBoot and all the validations of LLB, firmware, system, and policy signatures?
I've had my M2 MacBook Air for just over 3 weeks and I've already written 2.3 TB. I'm not sure how you have so little after 8 months. My M2 MBA is 24 GB/1 TB so it isn't swapping much.
The 2.3 TB isn't a problem and I agree with your second sentence.
Honestly, I was surprised it was that much. If I did the math correctly, it’s just under 11GB disk write per day and I’ve never pushed the RAM to swap. The 2.6TB number came from Drive DX data. No creative type of work, just books, documents, professional writing apps, dictionaries, financial stuff, etc.
That's true if AAPL were solely concerned with current profitability. But the other factor in their decision-making is maintaining their position as a premium brand.
And their marketing gurus, while good at what they do, are not perfect by any means. Just look at the OG HomePod, which AAPL allowed to die on the vine at a pricetag that the market clearly deemed too high, rather than lower the price to a more “commodity“ level ($200-250) and lose the premium mystique. Best Buy had a number of sales in which they sold the OG HomePod for $200 and, I believe, moved a substantial number of units. I never once considered the HomePod at $350 or even $300. But over the course of several sales at Best Buy, I did end up purchasing 6 (3 stereo pairs) at $200 apiece. If AAPL had set the starting price at $300 and dropped it to $225 or $250 when it failed to sell, we might still have full-size HomePods to buy.
And the reason to want to be viewed as a premium brand is to maximize profitability. There's literally no other reason.
That's quite crazy, what type of work do you do? And do you feel like you should have gone for the 16GB of RAM?
When I changed my workflow from my i9 32GB 16" to the MacBook Air M1 base model, I was writing 1TB of swap every month... So I kinda understand.
That's insane. I have only written 11TB since December when I got my M1 Max. And I am constantly moving a lot of data on my machine, so it's not like I am being overly nice to the SSD.
Not really. It's about 90 GB a day or about 33 TB a year. Much of that probably was setting up the computer. Things like VMs and containers can take up a lot of disk cause a lot of writes. I'm currently using about 500 GB of the 1 TB.
Edit: And your usage seems to be about 1/2 of mine so it's on the same order of magnitude. About 45 GB/day.
Software developer. I had 16 GB of RAM on my M1 MacBook Air. It seemed a little cramped for space sometimes so I went with 24 GB this time.